Review: Casio Gz'One Commando 4G LTE for Verizon Wireless

Casio has loaded the Commando with a significant number of custom applications, services, and widgets, all housed under the auspices of the G'zGear and G'zWorld names.

The G'zGear applications are meant for the outdoor enthusiast. There are 8 special applications in the G'zGear menu: Compass, pedometer, adventure training, trip memory, thermometer, tides, sun/moon rise and set times, and a star gazing application. They each offer pretty much exactly what you'd expect given their names. Quite frankly, these are some nifty and cool services if you know anything about or care about the outdoor world.

For example, the thermometer captures the real temperature where you're standing in addition to readings reported by official weather stations in the surrounding areas. The pedometer doesn't just rely on your stride length to make calculations, it also takes into consideration your height and weight to offer useful information. I found the compass to be highly accurate, and it tracked direction much, much faster than other phone compasses I've used. The sun/moon rise app shows the time that the sun and moon will rise and set for your location as well as any other that you might choose to type in. What's more, it shows a cool graphic of where the sun should be in the sky at any given time of the day (such as directly overhead at noon, etc.).

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Gz'Gear

In addition to being solid applications, most of them have extremely well-designed widgets that let you access the best features without having to open the full apps constantly. This is great, for example, if you're in the middle of a training run and need to make an adjustment to the pedometer application. Almost all of these widgets are active out of the box cluttering the home screen, so you may need to trim them down here and there until you have the information you're most interested in at hand. When I compared the data generated by the Commando with other tools/services that offer similar information, I found it to provide accurate and timely information. In other words, you can rely on what it tells you.

G'zWorld is a social-minded application that ties in with all the G'zGear apps. It lets you plot where you are on a map, upload photos, show the route you've taken between check-in points, and share it all with other users of the G'zGear and G'zWorld apps/services. I imagine it would be particularly useful to people on geocache hunts and other similar outdoor activities. These details can all be posted to Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, but not automatically. It requires users to log-in and manually share their adventures.